Scandal! My first WoW account was shared and after it was taken away I was lost. Not merely lost, undone. My level 60 shaman and warlock, gone! I wasn't particularly close to my guild, not close enough that I could see much hope of getting help with leveling back up to 60. Besides, the name Klepsacovic was taken on that server. I could have bought the account, but the price was high (thanks to me) and that's hardly secure.

That could have been the end of WoW for me.

I opened a new account and was ready to start again. But how? I was lost and alone. On a whim I went off to Wildhammer (or so I remember) and did some whoing. My hope was to find a few friends I had from the paladin forums. Despite being a shaman or sometimes warlock, I had ended up on the paladin forums. Thankfully, they were there. I talked to them about the problem. My first attempt was a human warrior. But that was a joke (literally, it was a joke). Second was a warlock, which was also a joke, but at level 1 she beat a level 3 mage, so I had a good feeling about it. Incidentally, I won by using melee rather than spells, which might explain my distress at the removal of firestones (a conjured offhand which boosted spell power and added fire damage to melee attacks).

I stuck with that warlock for a good bit of time. Later we went to Horde and Klepsacovic was reborn. Though I think I got his hair color slightly wrong. With the release of Burning Crusade a protection paladin engineer was created. In a raid with two of the forum friends (the third had wandered off into the nether by then) Kelpsacovic became my main and remained so for years. They were good times, with only brief upsets related to guild merging.

Wrath of the Lich King brought more of the same, though with a plethora of things to care about, yet nothing to kill WoW. Perhaps Cataclysm brought the same as well.

But something else changed. One of the friends, or maybe both, convinced me to do something stupid and expensive: transfer servers. The plan was to transfer and start a new guild. We had been in a guild at that point. Not a great guild, but I had some friends in it and I didn't think anyone was complete garbage (though some were not so great), so in retrospect, it was probably the best I could have asked for.

For $50 I took my main away from the guild I'd known and the friends in it and went off nearly alone. One friend wandered off and eventually betrayed the other (but that's another story for me to not tell you) and before long I was more or less alone.

I can't say whether Cataclysm would have kept me entertained the entire time and I still don't think it was as good as BC or LK. But I do think that if I had been with my guild I'd not have quit after only a couple months. Not even quit; it wasn't a rage-quit, just I didn't care. I had no friends, no one to talk to or share with, no one to group with, and I wasn't going to stumble across anyone in a cross-server random system (as I had in the past). Ultimately it was not any particular change in WoW that killed it for me, but a change in my social interaction with it.

I have a second data point for this theory: Guild Wars 2. My two friends from college (different people) started playing, and then wandered back to WoW. I am alone (though not without offers from Syl, who is unfortunately, foreign). Consequently, I have wandered away from GW2. It's a neat place, but it's a bit too big to be in alone.

New games should learn from this, not my story in particular, but the importance of social ties. Maybe offer group discounts on the box prices, to encourage people to move to the new game, not as individuals trying a new game, but as friends and guilds.